“We’re cowards, is why. Afraid to lose what peace we have.” She grew thoughtful in the lingering quiet. “Peter, you know you’re an old soul. A good, old soul.”
He nodded and gave her a smile. “You’ve said as much. It takes one to know one.”
She wiped the table with a napkin. “I do hope you get to settle down. From what I see, I wonder if you ever will.”
He met her gaze. “And what is it you see?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She shook her head. “A long run? Yes. A hectic, long run through danger. And change. I see much change.” Her eyes averted. “Hard to settle down with that.” The screen door rattled as George returned. She wiped the table again. “But that’s just my old mind musing, of course. It does so tirelessly.”
Her wan smile sealed the memory.
George returned with a sheaf of papers in hand. As if at a briefing, he offered a sheet. “Here’s the sketch of the bastard. If you see him, he’s dangerous.”
Johan tensed as he reached for it.
Paranoia. The sketch looked nothing like him. George handed him a second sheet. “Here’s the article.”
(Rotterdam, Netherlands – AP) – A woman who police said appeared to have been stabbed multiple times was found dead in a downtown apartment Saturday afternoon.
Police spokesperson Arlene Leigher said a neighbor on the third floor heard loud noises around 11am coming from below but dismissed them. At 11:30am another neighbor noticed the woman’s door off its hinges and found her body.
The identity of the victim, a woman in her late fifties, was not released pending notification of next of kin, Leigher said. “The degree of brutality exhibited was uncommon.” The murder weapon, a meat cleaver, was recovered at the scene.
“Some crime scenes are hard to process due to the sheer inhumanity inflicted upon the victim. Unfortunately, this is one of them.”
Police are considering the woman’s neighbor the prime suspect based on physical evidence. Details of that evidence were not disclosed but were described as ‘substantial’.
Leigher reports that preliminary investigations revealed the suspect was living under a false identity. At least two aliases have been uncovered. One is “Arnie”, the other “Peter Brusse”. There is no word on possible motivation for the killing.
Police have released a sketch of the suspect (view here) and are asking anyone with information about the suspect’s identity or whereabouts to contact the Rotterdam Police Department or Interpol (link).
The article contained a small black and white image of his apartment complex and Café Trevi on the first floor.
“Gah!” He could barely control himself. Feeling their eyes upon him, he covered. “Who butchers an old woman? For what possible reason? Terrible. Brings shame to my name.”
George’s imagination revealed itself when he asked if Peter’s previous cases might be involved, maybe an enemy sending him a warning.
“It’s possible, I suppose. Most likely it’s just coincidence. At least I hope it is.”
He finished his beer and changed the topic to a lighter one. A short time later he begged off to bed. He locked up the barn, rejoined the laptop upstairs, and considered the fifteen chunks stored on its drive. He scowled at the screen and resisted punching it. “You can’t possibly be worth this!”
He sat down. “My god.”
Why kill her? Wrenching guilt set in, a hot brand against his heart. He hadn’t planned on growing close. The jovial woman would bring the bill over, chatting sometimes for five, ten minutes or more. About the same age his mother would’ve been, she was every bit as caring and friendly. He’d cited a bad history with the phone company when he’d offered to pay her the cost of phone and DSL service if he could run the wire through the wall. It was a simple tactic to give him a chance for escape if ever a bust went down.
His escape had led to her brutal death.
Neither of us deserved to die. Anger surfaced and fused with guilt to form steely resolve. Mrs. Shulz’s killers would pay. He would assemble the file, open it, and put it out there – no matter what it contained.
He stood and paced the room. Someone had given a false description but why? No matter, a resident or the manager would offer the correction and soon. He stopped and glanced at the time, now also his enemy. When they released an accurate sketch, George would surely see it and recognize him. There would be no convincing him of his innocence – George played by the rules, believed in them and in the system itself. If police were searching for “Peter”, then “Peter” needed to see the police. Peter Brusse was now dead as an identity, as was Drehen Legters. Another, lesser grief descended for the carefully crafted personas that had become so familiar, so real.
Lucifer’s moment of doom stared from the wall.
He would leave, within minutes, with a note for George and Faiga saying simply that he was not involved in any way with the killing. Do not believe all that you read and are told. Through the hinterland and back to home, Elburg, where he could become his fallback, Max Dosch. Priorities aligned themselves: new transportation and a safe drive to the house.
He loaded his belongings into the van and with a deep sadness backed out of the barn, closed its heavy doors, and drove past the farmhouse into the night.
The wifi signal strength showed sixty percent on the street in Bogenhausen next to the industrial building where artists rented loft space.
From the back seat of the stolen Volvo Johan randomized his laptop’s MAC address and joined the network. He ought to be on the road out of the city but there was something to attend to first. If they wanted to hunt him down like a criminal for having done nothing, then he was going to do something. The file on Alcazar was some kind of prized truth, which meant it had value. Normally he’d play it close, control the asset, and bring in others after forming a monetizing strategy. Now, he might not make it to Elburg. The UG might delete it outright if it proved too hot. Or maybe Alcazar would fall to authorities. If so, the file would never see the light of day and Crosstalk’s last request would never be realized. Make it count.
He blinked at a pair of headlights coming down the avenue. A subtle shift of perspective cast its own light on the moment.
“If it belongs to the world...”
High karmic consideration floated, a challenge to self-interest. The car passed and the interior fell dim again. He thought of the last hack, InterGen, and of the admin that tried tracing him. He checked the email from Andreas.
Austin Bakken.
He accessed his control panel for Alcazar and created a sub-account with access to Crosstalk’s file. Next he created a downloader app for the file and prepared a note explaining how to use the visitor’s pass into Alcazar.
Both the downloader app and a note went into an encrypted file. He embedded clues for the file’s key into a fakie, a file that looked corrupt when viewed.
“If you’re worthy, then it is meant to be, Mr. Bakken. Figure it out or don’t.”
• • •
Papa Mario and his wife stood behind the couch their daughter sat on and regarded the uniformed police and dark-suited detectives in their living room. On the couch a shrunken Marie, pale and red-eyed from crying, looked as if she might be sick. Her mother was terrified and looked on in stifled disbelief.
Papa Mario leaned forward over the back of the couch. On his face was the anger at the embarrassment she’d caused. “You will give them the right description this time, won’t you Marie?”
Marie could only nod.
A skinny, balding man with a half-smile and a sketchpad came in the front door escorted by two more detectives. He surveyed the room in a glance, ignored the parents, and sat down next to Marie.
“Hello, my name is Hans. I understand Arnie was a regular customer at the café? Yes? Good. I’m sure you’ll give me the best description you can. Let’s begin.”
Several minutes into the interview, the artist seemed to be jumping ahead of Marie, fleshing out details as if
he already knew the face. She paled further but kept describing for some semblance of normalcy: the artist was drawing an exact picture of Arnie. Worse, he seemed to enjoy her unease.
Her mother looked away, more frightened at the proceedings than before.
Chapter 3
We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.
-Robert Frost, American Poet, 1875 - 1963
Four large screens showed activity on the global network. Status windows listed intrusions under way, recently acquired servers, botnet inventories, and real-time trace attempts on Underground operations around the planet. A square-jawed South American tapped arrow keys in time to a Led Zeppelin tune. He set off another mistrace operation against the tracers.
“Fuck you, NSA. Suck it.”
A request for review came in. Soldado scanned an intercept script written by a junior member.
“Gah! Newbcode. That SSL injection will crater.”
He wrote a few lines of code and sent it back. Notice of a successful wire transfer scrolled in the financials window, improving his already decent mood.
A ringing tone and red flashing bar indicated a priority message coming through Alcazar. “Okay okay, what’s this... Zero?”
MsgID: 39827091p Sent by: SlotZero
Soldado – xtalk’s last file extremely hot. phys trace to my pad ½hour of link recvd. Crosstalk toggled off, poss redblanket. im low moving to safety. offline tfn. Checking zmail.
“What the shit?” He sat up straight, muted the tunes, and killed his webcam. “Crosstalk dead? Nar, very nar.”
Crosstalk’s last login was several days ago. His message base showed him recruiting for a job, something big.
“No job notes on a BAP. No bueno.” Big Ass Plans called for review to avoid leading heat into the UG’s framework, online or off. Crosstalk always delivered job notes. Whatever he’d bitten into must’ve been so big it bit back. Nice to know what the hell it was. He suspended Crosstalk’s logon and put SlotZero’s account on a watch list.
Next, to verify his story.
• • •
The text message arrived halfway into his double bacon cheeseburger.
OSR3:HackReturn:IP=207.173.205.24
Austin leapt from his seat and headed for the door, ignoring the looks from diners and staff. He bumped open the glass doors and ran for his car. Wayne called from the NOC – they’d already started the trace.
“Next hop address. Deanin Industries in Bend, Oregon,” Wayne said. “Shall I call ‘em?”
“Yeah, put me on hold.” He swung out of the lot, gunning it. If he’d remembered his laptop he could be finishing lunch while running the trace himself. He slowed coming up on traffic.
Another engineer joined the line. “Dan here. He’s dumping a file on Promulgate. Slow, only half a meg so far. I copied a sample out and it’s encrypted. He hasn’t tried poking around yet.”
“Okay, watch him... where’s the trace at?”
“Wayne’s getting the next hop.”
He put two wheels up on a curb and drove fifty feet of sidewalk to make a right turn ahead of traffic.
“–he’s got it. Checking... okay, it’s residential DSL. Zombie. This is gonna be a dead end, I think. Yeah. And he’s out now. File’s done and it’s about three megs. He also left a readme doc.”
“Don’t open anything. I’ll be there in like four minutes.”
If Murray found out, he probably wouldn’t appreciate the trap. It might not matter that he and Rocom had restricted his access only to the Promulgate server.
Back in the office, checked on the readme file. It was an ordinary word processing file but with a complex message.
Below the jumbled text, an image contained a paragraph of text in what looked like German. Some of the letters appeared in bold font.
This was the hacker, his hacker. The references to the two traced locations were clear indications. A joke? Or an e-bomb? Curious, he copied the files to a memory stick and to the laptop before scrubbing them from the server. He couldn’t deny the excitement. Things like this didn’t happen every day. He just hoped it didn’t blow up in his face.
Wayne walked in with his hands in pockets. “So what’s the readme say?”
“Don’t know yet. Maybe clues to a cipher key for the file.”
“What if this is Omnicron?”
He thought back. The timing would fit. A year ago the security auditing firm Omnicron had worked for a week straight attempting to get into InterGen – electronically and via social engineering. This was something they might try, a simulated hack scenario to test their responses.
“If it’s them, I’m completely blown away they have Rocom playing along.” It seemed too elaborate even for InterGen’s auditors.
“If it is them, you fucked up with the cat and mouse trap routine, dude.”
He sighed. The possibility existed. “Have Dan close the hole.”
On the laptop, he checked the readme file again. No mention of an encryption key and without one, the file wouldn’t open. The image in the document showed German text with randomly bolded letters.
He wondered if Omnicron would be so imaginative. He tried using the bolded letters as the key, repeating each twice as suggested. Every combination failed. “Two parts, above and below”. The top text had to hold half the key but was jumbled.
The Rocom conference call rang in and lasted the rest of the day, drawing him into the lab to prod and poke a standby Crest router. By five o’clock he was done with firmware swaps and checking for sequenced buffer overflow attacks. One thing was certain – Omnicron wasn’t involved.
His cell vibrated – Kaiya with an invite for dinner at her place. Your fav - sweet n sour pork w/pork fried rice. Chow mein too. You can’t say no.
He texted back. Love it. 6:30?
See you then.
On his desk the laptop awaited a key to open the encrypted file.
He eyed the upper text again and tried a different sequence of keys. And again. Several tries later, he gave up with the thought that Kaiya might do better with it.
• • •
• • •
A power cord ran across the dining room floor, up to the table, past a plateful of Chinese food, and into the back of Austin’s laptop. Kaiya sat close, peering at the screen. It was looking unlikely they would find the key to the encrypted file.
“I think the corruption removed formatting,” he said between bites. “The bolding is obviously the markers for the bottom text and the note says it is, but the top is all jacked up. If it’s made to look corrupt, then why didn’t they include bolded letters? Or some other clue about markers? Or maybe the squares are because I don’t have the right font. But there are hundreds of thousands of fonts.”
She agreed. “Without the top text, I don’t see how you’ll figure it out.” She went back to her food. “You know, that intro text is creepy. Something that could threaten your life? I’m thinking you should just delete it all.”
The last bit sounded serious. Taking the clue, he pushed the laptop away.
“Screw it. I’m ruining dinner. Time to enjoy this culinary orgasm.”
“Not a bad idea.”
Flickering images from the television lit the darkened room. Kaiya dozed on the couch, exhausted from her day preparing for a big client presentation. After dinner he’d helped her tweak it by adding animations and color that made it pop nicely. They had started to watch a movie but she passed out early into it.
He sat in a recliner with the laptop, deep in thought. The upper text either held clues to the key or once did. The square characters were non-printable character codes usually seen in damaged files or...
Or, considering who he was dealing with –
He opened the file with a hex editor. Laid out in hexadecimal format, the entire message offered new possibility. To most it was a jumble of random numbers and letters but to him it was also where a hacker could leave clues.
It didn’t take long to find a pattern. Hex codes 04 and 00 appeared throughout the message. Both created the squares seen in the text in normal view. After studying the patterns, he saw the 04 code acted like a marker since it appeared only in single instances and sometimes after the last letter in a word, as if tagging the letter prior. It never appeared before the first letter in a word.
He checked all the 04 positions and noted the tagged characters one by one.
OOWIVULDENFFRIIALEUVETAYE ETFTFAMETYMM YBTHADHPWAVBE
“Okay...” He typed the string followed by the bolded characters from the lower text, twice for each instance they appeared.
Nope.
He flipped the order, lower text then upper text.
Still nothing.
“Damn,” he whispered, staring digital daggers. A complete waste of time.
Right before closing the files, he saw it. In the graphic, the last period in the paragraph was smaller than the one on the line just above it. Just a pixel or two difference. He zoomed in.
System Seven Page 4